The present invention relates to interface control systems and methods for use with consumer electronic devices. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for controlling a user interface on an appliance to enable enhanced user personalization and run time configurability.
Users of consumer electronic devices are increasingly interested in customization and personalization. This phenomenon has led to the wild popularity of highly personalized social networking websites pages, customizable ringtones for cellular phones, and background themes available for personal computers. Businesses and manufacturers have learned to capitalize on this user driven desire for more options by offering greater selections of product designs and colors.
This invention relates to consumer electronic devices, which include a wide range of devices, including personal computers, gaming systems and portable personal appliances such as media players, PDAs and mobile phones. Many of these consumer electronic devices have fairly similar user interfaces (UI). When looking at portable personal appliances in particular, generally speaking, the UI for such devices is part of the main application software, or code, or results from the application-specific toolkit used to design that interface.
Moreover, it is common for devices from the same manufacturer, or using the same technology base, to share many of the same core design features and so any customization or personalization is often limited. To accommodate the number of variants would require an enlargement of the operating system and consume memory in a way that dissipates the advantage of a shared core. Typically, changes which may be made by a user are relatively simple, focusing on changing backgrounds (wallpaper) or color palettes in use. In many cases alteration of the UI is possible only after changes to the core software with attendant economic penalties.
Normally an appliance may incorporate a user interface that determines how a user will experience the interaction. For example in an address book, a screen may display a symbol that invites a user to enter information and this visual element will depend entirely upon how the UI was conceived by the application programmer. Because users are strongly affected by perceived ease of use, and this is a subjective measure, manufacturers of physical product often perform lengthy studies to aid them in offering the “best” UI experience. Since the UI is often incorporated in the application program, the result is usually a longer development cycle and an unforgiving market reaction if the UI proves unpopular.
A common design pattern in computing science is the Model-View-Controller methodology originally described in reference to the Xerox PARC “Smalltalk” work circa 1979. Successful use of this scheme isolates business logic from user interface considerations, resulting in an application where it is easier to modify either the output appearance or user perception of the application or the underlying application business rules, each without affecting the other. However, a common limitation in handling the UI component of an appliance is that the UI must be specified at compile-time and thereafter only the limited and comparatively trivial changes discussed above are possible.
Commercial customization efforts to “re-skin” the display elements of a mobile phones have been attempted (TriGenix, acquired in October of 2004 and now absorbed into Qualcomm's Brew technology, used extended markup language in its ‘skinning’ application) but with mixed success mainly because of the complexity of use. This necessarily forced manufacturers to resort to a graphical approach to the problem with relatively onerous memory requirements.
Given the strong desire by users to personalize their appliance, as well as the risk of unpopular user interfaces which may dramatically damage appliance sales, there is a strong need to provide readily customizable interfaces which are relatively un-complex to use and do not pose onerous memory or processing requirements. Such systems and methods may provide enhanced control over personalization and modification of user interfaces in a wide range of consumer electronic devices at run time. Thus, a user may be able to see the results of changes immediately without the delays and difficulties that attend compilation and embedding processes.
In view of the foregoing, systems and methods for improving efficiency of personalization of an appliance are disclosed. The present invention provides a novel approach to the implementation of User Interfaces with unparalleled flexibility in the design phase, remarkable ease of use and minimal dependence upon an underlying application.